Since they started offering monthly reports on civilian deaths in their Syrian air war, the Pentagon has systematically under-reported the figures, routinely offering no more than 30% of the figures reported by NGOs, and ignoring many of the biggest incidents.
Having more or less gotten away with this falsehood, the Pentagon has decided to step up its game for September, wherein 104 civilian casualties were reported to them. Instead of whittling it down to a few dozen, the Pentagon has declared the actual death toll to be “zero.”
The official statement declared that the air war has “a clean bill of health,” and that there were “zero unintentional civilian deaths.” Unless they’re arguing all of the well documented deaths were deliberate, which they’re not, this is a significant escalation of their attempts to deceive the public about the war’s results.
The Pentagon has routinely used the claim that certain incidents were “not credible” to exclude them from reports. This month’s decision was to declare every single incident non-credible, and while they say that proves how seriously they take investigation, it’s clear the priority is to end with a low number on the bottom line.